Bulletin #715
Subject: FALSE FLAGS FLYING IN ‘THE PERFECT STORM’ OVER
A NEW HOLOCAUST, TO SUBVERT CLASS STRUGGLE….
25
September 2016
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
A colleague, who was never a
defender of Palestinian rights, recently announced to me that he thought Israel
was a cancer that would destroy the world and the neo-liberal clique now
running the American government, he thought, were the
world’s new, ghoulish undertakers, preparing dead bodies for burial in
oblivion.
Such extreme thinking is not unusual
today and the ten-year, $38,000,000,000 gift that the US Congress recently
bestowed on Zionist leaders, representing a 22% increase over past annual US
extortion payments to Israel, was a largesse extended by the American people
which also guaranteed US military-industrial expansion without much public
discussion. Such opacity in US policy-making engenders suspicion in many
quarters. Extreme right-wing bigots and racists can be counted among those who
are willing to hunt down and destroy minorities of all descriptions, but the
complicity of ordinary people in this activity begs for an analysis beyond the
usual Hobbesien description of life as, “nasty, brutish and short –a war of all against
all.”
With today’s precision technology,
obfuscation of means to achieve illicit ends has reached
new heights. The age-old question of Who benefits?, however, is still a useful
instrument for investigating crime.
In the first chapter of his book, Theories of Underdevelopment,
Ian Roxborough clearly differentiates some of the central ideas of three
early theoreticians whose interests coincided: to explain the historic
transition from traditional societies to modern societies. Karl Marx
(1818-1883), Max Weber (1864-1920) and Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) each focused
on the rupture and discontinuities between old societies and the new. They all
saw modern industrial society as a qualitatively new kind of society.
Weber emphasized how increasingly
wider spheres of life were brought under control of rational thought.
This process of rationalization of
the world meant that power was increasingly transferred out of the hands of
traditional political leaders and into formal organizations which embodied
rationality to a hitherto unknown degree –bureaucracies. Hand in hand with
increasing rationalization went increasing bureaucratic domination. This was
only one aspect of the process, the incumbents of bureaucratic roles could not
set goals for themselves, they could only follow
orders. There had to be some source of authority over and above the
bureaucratic structures of domination. With the demise of the authority of
traditional leaders, this position would increasingly be usurped by charismatic
leaders, upstarts from the mass, unrestrained by the ties and duties of
tradition or by the rational constraints of bureaucratic norms. Their actions
would be increasingly unpredictable. Yet after these outbursts of wild energy,
the forces of routinisation would reassert
themselves. A successor to the charismatic leader would have to be selected, the
following would be transformed into an organization, and bureaucratic routine,
with its formal rationality, would once again come to fore. Modern society
would witness an oscillation, a dialectic without development, between the long
periods of bureaucratic routine and irrational outbreaks of charisma.(p.2)
Weber saw himself as a latter-day
Jeremiah, a prophet of disaster to come; but he also explored in his analysis
“the potentialities of human freedom which the new order opened up. His
conclusions were deeply pessimistic.
Durkheim, on the other hand, offers
a genuinely conservative critique of the same subject, the social transition
from traditional to modern. His focus was on the dissolution of the traditional
bonds of solidarity which bound people to each other in the tightly knit
communities of pre-industrial society. As interpersonal bonds broke down in
modern society, there was a progressive depersonalization of society and a
person could no longer turn to authoritative institutions such as the Church
for spiritual guidance.
The old sources of moral direction
were in decay, and nothing had as yet replaced them. The soulless individualism
of modern society could not cope with the problem of widespread anomie.
Durkheim’s prescription was the creation of new institutions to replace the old
sources of moral authority with new organic solidarity. He was one of the early
corporatists theorists, and looked forward to a reintegration of human
communities around the axis of corporatist guilds formed at the workplace. Anomie
would give way to a new authoritative moral order. This solution was repugnant
to Weber’s individualistic Protestantism and the Kantian emphasis on individual
morality, but it did provide the basis for a major conservative critique of modern
society.(3)
Like Durkheim, Marx was concerned by
the absence of true community among people in industrial society. They both
sought to overcome the state of alienation and create a truly human community, but
where Durkheim envisaged total submission to a conservative and authoritarian
corporatism in which the individual would be subordinated to the collectivity,
Marx sought liberation of the individual in exactly the opposite direction.
Rather than receiving his moral
guidance from authoritative institutions; liberated man would freely come
together with his fellows to decide on a course of action. He would dominate
social institutions, rather than be subordinate to them. This subordination,
which for Durkheim was the solution to the problem of contemporary society, was
for Marx yet another symptom of man’s alienation; the reification of
interpersonal relations into the appearance of things-in-themselves.(4)
Marx, also like Weber, was impressed
by the productive potential of capitalism, and they both were in agreement that
it was only with the development of modern Europe that entire societies became
dominated by the capitalist impulse. But Marx believed that the inherent growth
dynamic of capitalism would create the conditions for its own demise.
The fundamental law of capitalist
development, for Marx, was the imperative need to accumulate capital. In order
to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the long run, the
ratio of capital to wages had continually to be increased. This produced
through a series of business cycles which, in the short term, brought with them
economic and political crises. The long-term trend was towards the massification of industrial establishments, the
homogenization of the workforce, and its increasing impoverishment. These
conditions would produce a constant class struggle between the workers and
their employers, and over time, the working class would come to a realization
that their only escape was to overthrow the existing society by seizing hold of
the state apparatus, abolishing private property in the means of production,
and beginning to form a new social order. The growing concentration and
centralization of capital would itself aid this process.(5)
Whereas Weber saw capitalism as “an
orientation towards economic activity, characterize by the rational (that is to
say systematic and calculable) pursuit of economic gain by purely economic
means,” which had existed in various forms throughout human history and
prehistory, for Marx capitalism was not defined by the motives and orientations
of capitalists; whatever capitalist believe their motives to be, they are
impelled by the logic of the economic system to accumulate capital.
Capitalism for Marx was a form of
class society structured around a particular way in which men were organized
for the production of the necessities of life. It had been preceded in Europe
by other forms of class society, in which the relationship between the class or
classes of direct producers and the class of non-producers, and the
relationship of both classes to the means of production, had been different. Immediately preceding capitalism in Europe had been feudalism,
characterized by a direct and unmediated form of exploitation compared with
industrial capitalism.
In feudal society, the direct
producer, the peasant, had immediate access to land and to tools and implements
with which to work the land. He was not separated from the means of production
like the worker in capitalism. The feudal peasant was, however, required to
work for the lord of the manor for a certain part of the week. This direct and
unmediated form of exploitation was held in place by a particular state force,
which included: a) laws restricting mobility; b) decentralized military and
judicial apparatus giving each lord “supreme authority”; and c) ideological
hegemony provided by the independent Church, which served as the justification
and the cement for the social structure.(pp.5-6)
Weber saw the transition from
traditional society to modern society essentially as a change in economic attitudes, in terms of the extension of
rationality (partly as a secular trend, and partly as an unanticipated
consequence of changes in religious doctrines), whereas Marx insisted that such changes
occurred only through the auspices of class
struggle, conducted by class-conscious actors who have strong reasons to
refuse to submit and wish to achieve their articulated goals.(p.7)
The 15 items below offer
CEIMSA readers descriptive information of contemporary corporate society and
the inherent contradictions this structure inflicts each day on our collective
lives, so badly battered by Zionism, Wahhabism and
neo-liberalism.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and
Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
Who Is Barrack Obama?
The Destruction of Barack Obama
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35568.htm
by Robert J. Burrowes
===========
b.
How
Barack Obama turned his back on Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies
by
Patrick Cockburn
World
View: A striking feature of the President's foreign policy is that he
learns from failures and mistakes
===========
c.
Syria Shows US Under
Military Rule
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160920/1045507773/syria-shows-us-under-military-rule.html
by Finian
Cunningham
===========
d.
Deep State America
Why U.S. Policies Serve No National Interests
http://www.unz.com/article/deep-state-america-2/
by Philip Giraldi
===========
e.
Israeli Arms Industry Faces Existential
Threat in New US Aid Agreement
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17285
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now fighting to remove the influence of
the military and security elite from the political process now that Israel can
no longer finance its arms industry through US aid, says political economist Shir Hever
===========
f.
Two-Party Tyranny: Ralph Nader on Exclusion of Third-Party
Candidates
from First Presidential Debate
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2016/9/19
===========
g.
If Hillary’s Not Able, There’s Always Kaine
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/20/if-hillarys-not-able-theres-always-kaine/
===========
h.
Goldman Sachs - La
banque qui dirige le monde
Goldman Sachs - La banque qui dirige le monde
http://www.thedossier.info/video/goldman-sachs-the-bank-that-rules-the-world.htm
===========
i.
Sen. Warren Calls for Wells Fargo
CEO to Resign & Face Investigation Amid Growing
Scandal
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/23/sen_warren_calls_for_wells_fargo
===========
j.
Does a Golden Parachute Await Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf?
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17289
Former
financial regulator Bill Black explains why criminal prosecutions of executives
time after time are not happening
===========
k.
SEC
Accusations Against US Billionaire Highlights
Centrality
of Insider Trading to Hedge Fund Profits
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=17294
Former
financial regulator Bill Black discusses the case of Leon Cooperman, who once
accused Obama of unfair treatment of the rich
===========
l.
US Proxies and
Regional Rivalries
US empire building depends on regional regimes’
support, especially in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
These proxy
regimes fulfill valuable military roles securing control over neighboring
regions, populations and territory.
by James Petras
September 20, 2016
"Information Clearing House"
- In recent times, however, we witness the same proxies developing their own
tendency toward expansionist policies - in pursuit of their own mini-empires.
Client regimes with
local or regional ambitions now present Washington with new points of
contention. At a time when the US empire has been
forced to retrench or retreat in the face of its prolonged losses, a whole new
set of conflicts have emerged. The post-imperial war zones are the new focus.
Often, imperial client regimes take the initiative in confronting their
regional adversaries. In other cases, competing proxies will brush aside their
US ‘mentors’ and advance their own territorial ambitions.
The break-up of the
US-dominated empire, far from ending wars and conflicts, will almost certainly
lead to many local wars under the pretext of ’self-determination’, or
’self-defense’ or protecting one’s ethnic brethren - like Ankara’s sudden
concern for the Turkmen in Syria.
We will examine a few of
the most obvious case studies.
The Middle East:
Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian Conflict
Over the past years, the
Turkish regime has been in the forefront in the war to overthrow the secular
nationalist Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
The Turks acted as
proxies for the US - providing military bases, supplies, training and
protection, as well as the point of entry, for overseas Islamist
terrorist-mercenaries acting on behalf of Washington’s imperial ambitions.
As the ‘independent’
Islamist threat (ISIS) gained territory, targeting US objectives, Washington increasingly
turned to its allied, mostly secular, Kurdish fighters. Washington’s Kurdish
proxies took over territory from both the anti-US Islamists as well as the
Syrian national government - as part of their own long-standing
ethno-nationalist agenda.
Turkey saw Kurdish
victories in northern Syria as a rallying point for autonomous Kurdish forces
within Turkey. President Erdogan intervened
militarily - sending tanks, warplanes and tens of thousands of troops into
Syria, launching a war of extermination against the US-proxy Syrian Kurds! The
Turkish invasion has advanced, taking Syrian territory, under the phony pretext
of combating ‘ISIS’. In fact, Turkey has created a wide, colonial ’safe zone’
to control the Kurds.
The Obama regime in
Washington complained but was totally unwilling to intervene as the Turks drove
the Kurds out of their northern Syrian home in a massive campaign of ethnic
cleansing. Thus, Turkish-Kurdish-Syrian warfare has broken out and the terms,
conditions and outcome are well beyond US control.
The US quest for an
imperial puppet regime in Syria has flopped: instead, Turkey gobbled up Syrian
land, the Kurds resisted the Turks for national-self-determination instead of
driving out the Islamist mercenaries and Damascus faces an additional threat to
its national sovereignty.
This brutal regional
war, started largely by the US and Saudi Arabia, will expose the extent to
which the US-Middle East Empire has shrunk.
Asia: Japan, Vietnam,
Philippine and China Conflict
The US Empire in Asia
has seen the making and unmaking of proxy states. After WWII, the US
incorporated Japan, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia
and New Zealand as proxy states in an effort to strangle and conquer China,
North Korea and Vietnam.
More recently India,
Vietnam and Myanmar have joined the US in its new militarist scheme to encircle
China.
Central to the
Obama-Clinton ‘Pivot to Asia’ is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a
singular effort to ‘unify’ Asian nations under US control in order to isolate
and diminish China’s role in Asia.
The original, post-WW2
proxies, South Korea, Philippines and Japan provided military bases, troops,
material and logistic support. Vietnam, the newest ‘proxy-on-the-block’,
welcomes Pentagon weapons aimed at China - despite the millions of Vietnamese
deaths during the US war in Indochina.
While most of the Asian
proxies continue to pay lip service to Washington’s ‘Sinophobic
agenda’, many do so on their own terms: they are reluctant to provoke China’s
economic wrath through Washington’s policy of direct confrontation. During the
recent ASEAN Conference in Laos (2016), nations resisted Washington’s pressure
to denounce China despite the ‘international court’ ruling against Beijing’s
South China Sea maritime claims. The US’ ability to influence events through
its Europe-based ‘international tribunals’ seems to have waned. The US cannot
implement its own transpacific economic ‘blockade’ strategy (TPP) because of
both domestic and external resistance. Meanwhile, new proxy relations have
emerged.
The proxy-stooges in
Tokyo face growing anti-proxy opposition from the Japanese people over their
nation’s role as a glorified US airbase. As a result Tokyo carefully pursues
its own anti-China strategy by forming deeper economic links to new or minor
proxy states in Indo-China, the Philippines and Myanmar. In the course of
developing its relations with these weaker proxy regimes, Japan is actually
laying the ground for autonomous economic and military policies independent of
the US.
Notably, the Philippines
under its new President Duterte, seeks to accommodate
relations with China, even as its neo-colonial proxy military relations with
Washington remain in place. The Western media kerfuffle over Duterte’s ‘colorful’ language and ‘human rights’ policies
masks Washington’s imperial disapproval with his independent foreign policy
toward China.
While India grows closer
ties with the US and even offers military co-operation with the Pentagon, it is
signing even greater Chinese investment and trade agreements - anxious to enter
the enormous China market.
In other words,
Washington’s Asian proxies have (1) widened their own reach, (2) defined
autonomous spheres of action and (3) have downgraded US efforts to impose trade
agreements.
Symptomatic of the decay
of US ‘proxy power’ is the ‘disinclination’ among Washington’s clients to
express overt hostility to Beijing. In frustration, the Washington-New York
financial mouthpieces (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal)
provide bully pulpits for the most obscure, marginal characters, including a
minor Hong Kong politician, a decrepit exiled Tibetan ‘holy man’ and a gaggle
of Uighur terrorists!
Washington’s Ephemeral
Proxies in Latin America
One of the most striking
aspects of US empire-building is the ease with which it has secured proxies in
Latin America… and how quickly they are undermined!
Over the past three
decades the US propped up proxy military regimes, which were overthrown and
replaced by independent governments in the last decade. These are currently
being replaced by a new wave of neo-liberal proxies - a motley collection of
corrupt thugs and elite clowns incapable of establishing a sustainable
imperial-centered region.
A proxy-based empire is
a contradiction in terms. The Latin American proxies are too dependent on
outside support, lacking mass internal popularity and roots. Their very
neo-liberal economic and social policies are unable to stimulate the industrial
development required grow the economy. The Latin American proxies are mere
predators, devoid of historical entrepreneurial skills of the Japanese and the
disciplined nationalist ideology of the Turks.
In that sense, the Latin
American proxies more closely resemble the Philippine ruling oligarchy: They
preach submission and breed subversion. Proxy instability and policy shifts
emerge as powerful forces to challenge the US empire -
whether the Chinese in Asia or domestic internal conflicts - like the Trump
phenomenon in the US.
Conclusion
Imperial wars continue .
. . but so does an upsurge in domestic instability, mass rejection of imperial
policies, regional conflicts and national wars. The decline of the empire
threatens to bring on an era of intra-proxy wars - multiple conflicts, which
may or may not benefit the US empire. The war of the
few against the many is becoming the war of the many against the many. But what
are the choices in the face of such historic shifts?
Only the emergence of
truly class-conscious organized mass movements can offer a positive response to
the coming deluge.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at
Binghamton University, New York.Please see his latest book: “The end of the Republic and the
Delusion of Empire”, Clarity Press 2016 ISBN 978-0-9972870-5
===========
m.
Why US Had to Kill the Syrian Ceasefire
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/09/20/why-us-had-kill-syrian-ceasefire.html
by Finian Cunningham
===========
n.
Will Russia Surrender?
by Paul Craig Roberts
September 20, 2016
"Information Clearing House" - - The Russian government’s sincere and diligent
effort to prevent chaos in Syria and additional massive refugee flow into
Europe, all the while avoiding conflict with Washington and its vassals, has
been brought to an end by Washington’s intentional attack on a known Syrian
army position, thus wrecking the cease fire agreement that Russia sacrificed so
much to achieve.
The response to this
fact by the Obama regime’s ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, reveals that
Washington will lie to the hilt in order to achieve its agenda of reducing
Syria to the same chaos as Washington has reduced Iraq and Libya. Washington,
and Washington alone, is responsible for the war in Syria. When the British
Parliament and the Russian government blocked Obama’s intended US invasion of
Syria, the Obama regime armed and financed jihadist mercenaries to invade
Syria, pretending that the jihadists were Syrian rebels fighting for democracy
in Syria. Samantha Power turned history upside down and blames the war on Russia’s intervention at
the request of the Syrian government against the ISIL jihadists that Washington
sent to destabilize Syria. What Samantha means is that if Russia had not come
to the aid of Syria, Washington and ISIL would already have destroyed Syria,
and there would be no war.
Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, said that in his 40 years of diplomacy he had never
seen such a high-handed and demagogic performance as Samantha’s. Churkin seemed to imply that such an unrealistic and
twisted response to known facts as Samantha delivered leaves him without hope
of any successful diplomatic outcome.
If the Russian
government has finally arrived at the conclusion that Washington is determined
to destroy political stability in Syria and to replace it with chaos, it has
taken a long time.
The Russian government
has studiously avoided this conclusion, because once diplomacy is acknowledged
as useless, force confronts force. In today’s context that means thermo-nuclear
war and the end of life on Earth.
This is the reason that
the Russian government has replied diplomatically to Washington’s coercive
provocations, offering Washington cooperation in place of conflict.
However, Washington
wants conflict. The Russians have pretended that Washington has a common
interest with Russia in combating terrorism, but terrorism is Washington’s tool
for destabilizing Syria, then Iran, and then the Muslim provinces of the
Russian Federation and China.
Washington wants hegemeny not cooperation. Now that Samantha Power has made
this so clear that the Russian government can no longer pretend otherwise, what
will Russia (and China) do?
If Russia and China are
not ready for the war that Washington is bringing to them, will they retreat in
the face of the aggression, sacrificing Syria, the break-away Russian provinces
from Ukraine, and the various disputed island issues in the Pacific Ocean while
they gather their strength? Or will they decide to break-up the NATO alliance
by making the cost of conflict very clear to Washington’s European vassals?
Clearly, Europe has nothing to gain from Washington’s aggression against Russia
and China.
Or is Russia unable to
do anything now that diplomacy is a proven dead-end?
Perhaps this is the
over-riding question. As far as someone who is not a member of the Russian
government can tell, Russia is not completely in control of its destiny.
Elements in the Russian government known as “Atlanticist
Integrationists” believe that it is more important for Russia to be part of the
West and to be integrated into the Western system than to be a sovereign
country. They argue that if formerly great powers, such as Great Britain,
Germany, and France, can profit from being American vassals, so can Russia.
Atlanticist
Integrationists claim that Russia’s strategic nuclear capability and land mass
means that Russia can maintain some sovereignty and only partially submit as a
vassal. One problem with this position is that it assumes the neoconservatives
are content with less than complete hegemony and would not capitalize on
Russia’s weakened position to achieve full hegemony.
The Russian government
probably still has hopes that at least some European governments will recognize
their responsibility to avoid war and exit NATO, thus removing political cover
for Washington’s aggression. Possibly there is some such hope, but the main
European political figures are bought-and-paid-for by Washington. As a high US
government official told me as long ago as the 1970s, “we own them; they belong
to us.”
Not much hope can be
found in the European media. Udo Ulfkotte,
a former editor of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a book in which he said that every
significant European journalist was on the CIA’s payroll. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-28/top-german-journalist-admits-mainstream-media-completely-fake-we-all-lie-cia
With politicians and
media bought off, where can European leadership come from?
Europeans have become
accustomed to their role as hired vassals. As no European politician or
newspaper editor can assume that an act of rebellion would succeed, they are
more likely to enjoy their life enriched by American gratuities than to take a
risk for humanity.
The wider question is
whether the extant socio-politico-economic systems can act in behalf of humanity.
It is not clear that capitalist civilizations are capable of being humane,
because worth is based on money, which makes greed and power the overpowering
factors. It is possible that human evil and incompetence have destroyed not
only the planet’s environment but also humane social systems. Globalism is not
a scheme for cooperation. It is Washington’s scheme for American domination.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost
, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.===========
o.
Moral Mondays Leader Rev. Barber:
Release Video of Keith Scott Shooting,
It Belongs to the Public
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/23/moral_monday_leader_rev_barber_release